Excerpt: The Shaman of Turtle Valley by Clifford Garstang
About the Book: http://www.braddockavenuebooks.com The author of the award-winning What the Zhang Boys Know ( …utterly beautiful and unforgettable Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang) now gives us a heart-rending first novel about love, displacement, and the powerful ghosts that haunt so many families. The Alexanders have farmed the land in Turtle Valley for […]
Excerpt: Something Like the End by Ashley Morrow Hermsmeier
About the Book: http://www.blacklawrence.com Winner of the Fall 2017 Black River Chapbook Competition. Laced with foreboding and propulsive menace, Ashley Morrow Hermsmeier’s new collection of short fiction reverberates with the clang of alarm bells. Confronted by inescapable dark in the face of a certain end or its apocalyptic aftermath, the characters in these six stories […]
Excerpt: The Good Echo by Shena McAuliffe
About the Book: http://www.blacklawrence.com Winner of the The Big Moose Prize and the Balcones Fiction Prize. Set in the 1930s, and spanning the globe, THE GOOD ECHO is the story of a marriage between controversial nutritionist and dentist Clifford Bell, and his quietly courageous wife Frances. After their young son dies from surgery Clifford performs, […]
Excerpt: Tornado Season by Courtney Craggett
About the Book: http://www.blacklawrence.com “TORNADO SEASON arrives as a storm is raging. Yet its stories urge us not to seek shelter, but to leave it. To walk out of our inner place of hiding and face the whirlwind. To recognize it. To acknowledge it and fight it. Ethnicity and culture alongside the U.S.-Mexico border; deportation […]
Excerpt: The Hypothetical Man by Paul Maliszewski and Ryan Weil
About the Book: http://www.trnsfrbooks.com THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN is a darkly humorous collection of stories featuring an assortment of anonymous characters–A, B, and S–all with problems. They work undercover at an amusement park in Illinois or else they work at a secret government facility that would prefer not to be named. They attend a freewheeling sales […]
Excerpt: Oranges by Gary Eldon Peter
About the Book: http://www.newriverspress.com LGBTQIA Studies. “ORANGES is a book of quiet, enormous strength, a collection of slow-gathering moments that add up to the story of Michael Dolin, a gay man whose life and loves are shaped by the AIDS crisis, Midwestern social strictures and expectations for men. There is so much here, such compassion, […]
Excerpt: Alligator Zoo-Park Magic by C.H. Hooks
About the Book: http://www.bridgeeight.com Is Jeffers an Alligator Zoo-Park magician or the Messiah? Two friends live unapologetically on the edge of poverty in the rugged, un-decorous part of the South. Jimmy, a single father with an addict ex, and Jeffers, a magician whose tricks are closer to miracles–both are immersed in a place where trailers […]
Excerpt: Layla and the Lake by Marcia D. Ross
About the Book: Layla, an aspiring poet and third string editor in Boston, brings her two children to visit her former in-laws at a lakeside cottage in rural Maine. There she is greeted with wariness, and there she discovers love and trouble across the water. Set in the early 1980s, with interludes glimpsing the past, […]
Review: Why Karen Carpenter Matters by Karen Tongson
A perfect blend memoir / autobiography and music / culture. Tongson’s Why Karen Carpenter Matters is a perfect telling of influence and community. In Why Karen Carpenter Matters, Karen Tongson (whose parent named her after the pop icon) interweaves the story of the tiger’s rise to fame in the 1960’s and 70’s with her own […]
Review: The Burning Girl by Claire Messud
http://www.pelekinesis.com The Burning Girl is a story of two young girls, Julia, the narrator, and Cassie—best friends since kindergarten—on the verge of becoming teenagers. The story opens with Julia reflecting back on Cassie – who we are told has moved over two years ago now. But more than just a friend moving away, it is […]